PBS's The War just ended.

WOW.... that was absolutely great. Great music, very moving. Excellent.

My father served in Europe and only wish he were alive to have watched this series. Very well done and hopefully gives those who watched a sample of how life was. I grew up with the stories...I still have his Army locker that is full of letters he wrote to my mother. Kudos, again, to Ken Burns for creating a living document to our history and how intense this war was.

I hope it will be released on DVD in the near future....:shrug:

for an early Christmas gift.

:thumbsup:

store ads and then i remembered "Hey christmas is coming, people will want to buy this as gifts"

for seven weeks according to Ken Burns on NPR last week. I don't remember which day of the week or when it will start though. I think he also said they will do a marathon of it and show all seven episodes back to back - they do that on Sunday afternoons sometimes. They did the marathon of The Civil War, The West, Mark Twain over the past couple of months on Sunday afternoons.

I think... Glad I get a second chance..

geez, the things those soldiers had to endure, god, and what 14 million served, it was a terrible war. The footage is amazing.

I have been absolutely transfixed by this series. I'm so glad I taped it so I can watch it again.

i was also bawling at the end of one of the episodes last week, they were reading letters from a solder named "Babe" and they kept showing his picture and talking to his family and in his letters he never wanted to worry his mother so he didn't let her know he was on the front lines. At the end it had his sister reading aloud a letter she wrote him and then they let us know that Babe dies just a few weeks short of his 21st birthday.

Kidding.

Extremely well done. I can't believe how much I had either forgotten or didn't know.

As an aside; those gorgeous men! Swoon. And so many dead. :cry:

I too would have loved to watch this with my Daddy, but he passed in 02.
He was on Pelilu and Okinawa. He was sent to Pearl Harbor to come home for leave before being sent to Japan when they dropped the bomb and Japan surrendered. He always said that the bomb saved millions of lived.
He never would let any of us buy a Japanese car.

Those were terrible battles.

He was a flame-thrower and had terrible nightmares of burning men coming out of the caves.
They had a life expectancy of 32 seconds once they stepped in front of the opening of the cave.

He said all they did on leave was drink, it was the only way they didn't flip out about going back in. He would say if you had a sober thought it was "Oh $hit! I gotta do that again?"

He hated riding on the boats onto the islands.

I kept remembering all he had said watching this show....

I can't imagine!

When he got his papers to go to Korea, my grandmother fainted and fell down the steps...

so many died that way, including my gr uncle, going ashore at Leyte Island. My grandfather was at Okinawa, also using flame throwers and guarding "Jap prisoners" as he called them. I still have a lot of photos from Okinawa that he took at the time. It all looked very familiar.

I think Grandpa's drinking problem he developed later started with the war.

In fact, Grandmama walked across the stage to get his diploma. (Along with a lot of other mothers.) He was on a ship to Japan when the bomb was dropped so he never saw any action.

I've always been ambilivent about the bomb, but after watching the series & especially Okinawa, I've changed my mind.

I couldn't believe that after dropping two bombs the Japanese generals were split on whether to surrender or not. The inhumanity of the generals to risk the entire population was incredible.

at Guam or Iwo Jima - I can't remember right now. Anyways, the landing craft took a direct hit and was towed back out to sea to bury what was left. All the families of those aboard were informed that their sons were dead. My uncle had three funeral masses said for him.

Months later, they got a telegram that he was alive. He had been hit, but someone dragged him to shelter and the wounded were brought to him to be patched up as much as he could until he lost consciousness. His tags were lost and no one knew who he was until he woke up.

Back in the 90's, as all the 50 year anniversaries came up, NBC take a few minutes on its newscast to mark the anniversary and show film footage of the battle or landing. I was watching the shots of all the guys standing on deck, waiting to disembark and several shots of guys riding in land craft. There in one of the shots was my uncle; probably the last few minutes of his life that were without pain.


When we see these films, all the faces are so anonymous. I just have to think that whenever those films are shown, someone recognizes a brother, a father, an uncle or grandfather.

with basically the same format (real people stories, etc)....

I had the oddest reaction to this series. I saw Ken Burns with Olbermann and know where he's coming from and it's a good place. However, seeing this long series on war.....right now at this juncture with Iraq going on and Iran probably next up.....I really didn't want to watch it, and only tuned in by accident to this last segment. I just got the feeling that due to the timing, the thing inadvertently may have created a message that was opposite of what Burns wanted to convey. Burns said the he wanted people to see how people sacrificed and these days, nobody really makes any sacrifice except for the troops, and we don't see it happening. But for me, I felt it may fuel more "gung ho" types of feelings. I just wish it had been aired apart from the present war fixation of Bushco.

The Repukes can't compare these 2 wars at all!!

We kicked ass in 4 years all over the world in The War..

He hasn't been able to find Osama Bin Hidin in one area, plus borrowing trillions of dollars!!!

No one is using ration stamps.... saving tires, tin, grease!!!

My mom's family had some money, but they used ration stamps, and sat in the dark every night!


People today think it's cool for Paris Hilton to spend 200,000 on a frickin watch!!!

DURING WAR TIME!!

6 months or so we lost soo many men & equipment with nothing to show for it. In the end we took Okinawa with a huge loss, but we still took control. At first, we were just losing. Japan & Germany had been gearing up for years & we had been in the Depression.

between the WWII of Burns' documentary and BushCo's war is going to see that our invasion of Iraq and our continued waste of lives, money and good will is a complete travesty.

Anyone who ends up feeling "gung ho" about Iraq as a result of watching The War, is already hopelessly dense.

It was sung by Norah Jones.

The piano version of the Nimrod variation of the "Enigma Variations" by Sir Edward Elgar was very good too. It played right before the last song.

The Nimrod variation as a choral piece "Requiem Aeternam" (Eternal Rest) is very powerful. They played that at my dad's funeral because I picked out the music to be played(A CD by the Choir of New College, Oxford called "Agnus Dei").

Dad was in the Army Air Corps before it was the Air Force. Norden bombsight mechanic. In Italy, France and Germany. 483rd Bombardment Group.

Seriously, I couldn't watch this series, he just takes too frickin' long, and takes too many meandering by-ways for my taste.
If you really want to watch a well-balanced war series, "The World At War" is hard to beat, for a start it's not America-centric.

a qoute from the show....